ICE prepares detention blitz with historic $45 billion in funding

The tax and spending bill passed by Congress on Thursday will triple federal funding for immigrant detention centers

by Douglas MacMillan

The tax and spending bill passed by Congress on Thursday will triple federal funding for immigrant detention centers, setting the stage for a rapid expansion of these facilities and adding to concerns about the treatment of the growing numbers of immigrant detainees.

Congress allocated $45 billion to spend locking up immigrants over the next four years — more than the government spent on detention during the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations combined, federal data show. The bill also includes $46.5 billion for building the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and $6 billion for border technology and surveillance, along with other border security and immigration measures.

This is the most “funding we have seen for a border immigration agenda in the history of the country,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, who researches criminal justice and incarceration in her role as a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. “We are seeing a wholesale expansion of ICE detention centers.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say they plan to use the money to roughly double the nation’s detention capacity to 100,000 beds, giving them more capacity to arrest undocumented immigrants targeted for deportation. The average daily population of ICE detainees rose to 56,000 last month — the highest number since ICE began releasing those figures during the first Trump administration — and administration officials have acknowledged the surge in immigrant detainees has sometimes outpaced their ability to accommodate all of them.

“This bill will make our communities safer by making a historic investment in our border security,” Rep. Addison McDowell (R-North Carolina) said on the House floor Thursday morning. “No more dangerous illegal aliens parading around with no consequences.”

In an emailed statement, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the money will help ICE pay for 80,000 new detention beds and 10,000 new ICE agents. She said the added resources and staffing are needed “to secure the homeland and keep Americans safe.”

The U.S. immigrant detention system — the largest in the world — grew over the past four decades as a way to hold undocumented immigrants while they wait for their asylum claims or deportation cases to be processed. The network, which is largely composed of dozens of detention centers run by private contractors as well as dozens of county jails that contract part of their facilities to ICE, has in the past mostly been populated by border crossers deemed a flight risk or migrants charged with a crime.

During this Trump administration, however, as border crossings have dropped and ICE has increased arrests of people throughout the interior of the country, the detainee population is changing. As of June, about one-third of ICE detainees have never been charged with a criminal offense, and ICE is now arresting people with no criminal charges at a higher rate than people charged with crimes, according to Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies immigration data.

This year, ICE has already awarded new or expanded contracts to at least nine facilities owned by the Geo Group or CoreCivic, the two largest detention contractors, as well as contracts to companies that house immigrants in makeshift tent structures. The House of Representatives Appropriations Committee recently called that prior spending “budgetary mismanagement” because it surpassed the agency’s budget and forced the government to transfer funds that had been allotted to other agencies.

Together, Geo and CoreCivic have at least 14 additional unused prisons, which could be repurposed to hold thousands of ICE detainees in states including California, Colorado, North Carolina and Oklahoma, the companies have said. In some places, the firms are already taking applications for hundreds of jobs they expect to fill when contracts are awarded, such as at an unused former prison owned by CoreCivic in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Immigrant rights advocates are imploring the government not to award more contracts to Geo and CoreCivic, companies they say have failed to provide safe accommodations and adequate medical care to detainees. In recent weeks, immigrants protested what they said was a lack of adequate food and water at a Geo-owned facility in Newark, while detainees at a CoreCivic facility in Torrance County, New Mexico, complained they were not permitted to flush toilets for days at a time.

Steve Owen, a spokesman for CoreCivic, said in an emailed statement that a water issue at the New Mexico facility was resolved “within less than two weeks, and at no time were residents without drinking water or the ability to flush toilets.” He said CoreCivic facilities uphold federal standards and provide detainees with three nutritious meals per day and “24/7 access to medical care.”

Geo Group spokesman Christopher Ferreira said in an email that the company complies with all ICE detention standards and that its facilities, which provide around-the-clock access to medical care, food and other services, “are never overcrowded.”

At least 10 immigrants died while in ICE’s custody during the first half of this year — a higher number than ICE reported for any full year since 2020, when 18 people died, according to the agency’s mandated disclosures.

McLaughlin declined to comment on the deaths.

The share prices of Geo and CoreCivic each rose about 3 percent Thursday, as investors cheered the passage of congressional funding likely to result in a flurry of new contracts. On calls with Wall Street analysts this year, Geo Group executives have primed shareholders for a government contract bonanza that could boost annual revenue by more than 40 percent and profits by more than 60 percent.

ICE has indicated it also plans to rely on an array of more unconventional vendors to meet its detention goal. The agency last month published a list of more than 40 contractors that it had approved for an “emergency acquisition” process that will help facilitate speedy contract awards, Bloomberg News first reported. The list included nine providers of tent structures, including Deployed Resources, which in April was awarded $3.8 billion to build a migrant detention center on the Fort Bliss military base in Texas.

While immigrant advocates have raised concerns about living conditions in tents, where it can be more difficult to provide ventilation and guard against harsh weather, the Trump administration has embraced these makeshift structures for the flexibility they offer. In April, when a Miami detention center became overcrowded, the facility erected a large white tent to hold hundreds of people. Trump planned to detain thousands of migrants in tents at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, but so far the facility has been used only sparingly.

This week, ICE said it was sending some migrants to live in tents at an airstrip in the Everglades. That facility, initially funded by Florida, will be reimbursed with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said on Instagram.

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

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